Wednesday, November 2, 2005

100 years ago

There were contests in four out of the six wards in the elections held at York the previous day, namely Castlegate, Walmgate, Micklegate, and Monk Wards. The result for Micklegate Ward was a win for J B Morrell (Liberal) as he succeeded over A P Mawson (Labour) and W H R Hopkins (Independent), 2,146 votes were cast from 3,082 on the register with three spoilt papers. In Walmgate Ward R Richardson (Conservative) triumphed over W H Birch (L) and K E T Wilkinson (Liberal), 1,927 votes were cast from 2,919 on the register with two spoilt papers. Whilst Castlegate Ward saw victory for O F Rowntree (Liberal) over his opponents W Boddy (Conservative) and J M Hogge (Liberal). The poll was a heavy one, 1,727 votes being recorded out of a total of 2,421, with six spoilt papers. Finally Monk Ward gave W R Robinson (Conservative) the lead with R G Hayes (Liberal) and W M Marris (Labour) following. There were three spoilt papers.

50 years ago

In the report of the East Riding Town and Country Planning Committee, to be submitted to the County Council shortly, it was stated that the Committee were informed that an inquiry had been received concerning the demolition of Heslington Hall, near York. The report stated that Heslington Hall was a building that the Ministry had indicated would be included in a future list of buildings of special architectural or historic interest to be prepared under the Town and Country Planning Act. The County Planning Officer reported that there still appeared to be some prospect that a use would be found for the building and that it was understood to be unlikely that the building would be sold for demolition.

25 years ago

One of the world's most sophisticated small computers, which had the capability of bringing spelling mistakes to the operator's attention, was on view in York to computer-users from all over the country. It was one of the items among £700,000 worth of computer equipment, which had been assembled at the Viking Hotel, York, as part of IBM's first general business group symposium. The Displaywriter System, with the innovative spelling correcting capability, was the star of the event, and each demonstration of the machine so far had been packed to capacity. The machine, which retailed at £5,000 for just the basic working station, had programmed into it a dictionary of 50,000 words, with extra capacity available, for specialised businesses to insert their own technical terms. Each individual word inserted into the machine through an electronic keyboard was compared with the dictionary, and the VDU screen highlighted any word it did not recognise.

Updated: 12:32 Tuesday, November 01, 2005